Breath, the feature film directorial debut of the actor Simon Baker, begins with a shot of white light flooding the frame. An image of a body under water gradually comes into focus.

From that opening moment the film’s colour grading has a misty and melancholic quality, as if emulating seafoam or mist from the crest of a wave. The cinematography (by Marden Dean and, for the water sequences, Rick Rifici) is as concerned with distribution of light as it is colour and movement, presenting big, airy, oxygen-filled compositions.

This style is a far cry from the conventional way to shoot surfer and beach films: with deep blues and hot, sun-kissed yellows and oranges. Notable Australian surfer movies include 1977’s energetic but dramatically wobbly Summer City, featuring Mel Gibson’s first film performance, and 1981’s Puberty Blues, among the better and more memorable of its kind. Newcastle (2008) and Drown (2015) told “kids getting trashed” stories with mixed results, while last year’s tweeny drama Rip Tide is a cheesy yarn about following your dreams.

All these films view surfing as a recreation for the young. Breath revolves around a pair of teenage boys, Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and Loonie (Ben Spence), but the emergence of a third and fourth older character are integral to the vision. It is a coming-of-age journey tempered by a complex, tricky contemplation of the nature of grief and thrill-seeking.

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This was hinted at from the start of the novel on which Breath is based, in which Tim Winton – the Australian literary world’s pre-eminent “poet of the beach” – introduced an ambulance man, whose latest traumatic job triggered memories of his childhood, setting the tone for the rest of the story. That chapter is jettisoned and a Wonder Years-like narration (voiced by Winton himself) is introduced, complementing the film’s visual melancholia with a wistful sense of perspective.

For the most part Baker focuses on a small number of intensely drawn characters. So much so that Breath feels almost like a chamber piece, the largeness of the ocean an alternative to boxed-in settings and closed spaces. Pikelet and Loonie, circa the mid-1970s, buy crappy surfboards and take to the water. Their friendship with Sando (Baker) begins when the older, wiser, freewheeling surfer gives them a lift. As in Winton’s novel, the parents of each boy are present but relegated to the story’s peripheries, adding to the sense of Sando being a fatherly role model.

The same cannot be said, in terms of surrogate parentage, of Sando’s partner, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), a former competitive skier from the US. For the boys she is a confusing erotic presence: too old to be a conventional love interest; too young to be their mother. Her character is gradually filled in and Debicki’s excellent, shrewdly distanced performance becomes increasingly nuanced. Is Eva pitiable, or hard-hearted, or both? Debicki communicates a kind of impenetrable sorrow – and the unmistakable feeling that something inside Eva is dead or dying.

Sando delivers pearls of wisdom to his young proteges, connecting surfing to spiritual profundity and notions of mystery and myth. He is worlds apart from a Mr Miyagi-esque caricature of inspiration, neither the film-maker nor the characters are prepared to sanctify his life experiences or put his aloof personality on a pedestal. When Sando tells the boys that surfing is “about your moment in the sea”, Loonie rejects this proclamation of “hippy shit”.

Sando (Simon Baker) delivers pearls of wisdom to his young proteges. Photograph: David Dare Parker

The characters return to the ocean as if pulled by force. Baker’s crisp, almost wintry style visually reiterates the script’s rejection of the simplifications of nostalgia, preferring to view the past as a complex network of competing emotions and relationships. Moments on and around the water unfold with a sense of naturalism; they feel almost like poetic documentary. The ocean is presented as a kind of cleansing palette, where the minutiae of day-to-day existence is temporarily washed away, but the large questions – signified by the vastness of the water, perhaps – remain.

The natural beauty of the film’s coastal, Western Australian settings provides scope for symbolic interpretation. But like Winton’s novel, the film is unpretentiously profound, with a very Australian (and very cinematic) regard for allowing natural beauty to speak for itself. It is the rarest kind of sports movie, in that it will encourage in participants a different, thoroughly thoughtful perspective with which to view their pastime. Breath is a surfer film with soul and gravitas.